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Workshop on Clinical Image-Based Procedures

CLIP 2014: Clinical Image-Based Procedures. Translational Research in Medical Imaging pp 33–40Cite as

Automated Estimation of Aortic Intima-Media Thickness from Fetal Ultrasound

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 8680))

Abstract

Intima-media thickness (aIMT) of the abdominal aorta has proven to be an early marker for atherosclerosis and cardiovascular diseases risk assessment in young adults and children. Despite recent studies have highlighted the potential usefulness of its estimation at the fetal stage from ultrasound images, this relies on error-prone and tedious manual tracing. In this study, an automated technique for aIMT estimation from fetal ultrasound images is presented and tested against manual tracing. The proposed technique is based on narrow-band level-set methods applied to the regions surrounding the aortic lumen in order to segment the portions between the blood-intima and media-adventitia interfaces and thus estimate the aIMT. This approach was tested on images acquired from 11 subject at a mean gestational age of 29 weeks. Automatically extracted aIMT values were compared to reference values manually extracted by two interpreters using Pearson’s correlation coefficients, Bland-Altman and linear regression analyses. The results indicate that the accuracy of the proposed technique is comparable to that of manual tracing. As a consequence, this approach could be potentially adopted as an alternative to manual analysis for the automated estimation of aIMT.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Padova, Italy

    Giacomo Tarroni & Enrico Grisan

  2. Department of Woman and Child Health, University of Padova, Padova, Italy

    Silvia Visentin & Erich Cosmi

Authors
  1. Giacomo Tarroni
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  2. Silvia Visentin
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  3. Erich Cosmi
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  4. Enrico Grisan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Giacomo Tarroni .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Children’s National Health System, Washington, District of Columbia, USA

    Marius George Linguraru

  2. Fraunhofer IGD, Darmstadt, Germany

    Cristina Oyarzun Laura

  3. Children’s National Health System, Washington, District of Columbia, USA

    Raj Shekhar

  4. Fraunhofer IGD, Darmstadt, Germany

    Stefan Wesarg

  5. ICREA - Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

    Miguel Ángel González Ballester

  6. Fraunhofer IGD, Darmstadt, Germany

    Klaus Drechsler

  7. Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Ikoma, Nara, Japan

    Yoshinobu Sato

  8. Fraunhofer IDM@NTU, Singapore, Singapore

    Marius Erdt

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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Cite this paper

Tarroni, G., Visentin, S., Cosmi, E., Grisan, E. (2014). Automated Estimation of Aortic Intima-Media Thickness from Fetal Ultrasound. In: Linguraru, M., et al. Clinical Image-Based Procedures. Translational Research in Medical Imaging. CLIP 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8680. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13909-8_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13909-8_5

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-13908-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-13909-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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